Create a plumi.torrent component, added to the Plumi buildout. Include option to install this inside the Plone control panel.

Firstly attempt to create our own tracker, as well as the option to use the http://openbittorrent.com/ tracker as part of this component. If major difficulties encountered in this then possibly think about only offering the http://openbittorrent.com/ option for the first iteration of this feature. Either way, it will include a torrent client to seed the torrents.

Issues with running own tracker: compiling another bit of software within the buildout (not a major issue), hosting providers may not allow torrent traffic (but this would be a problem with running a client anyway), complexity of setting this up as part of this feature (hard to tell at this stage).

Issues with http://openbittorrent.com/ - reliance on another service (if this service goes down then torrent sharing goes down), possibly issues with retrieving statistics (number of seeders etc.)

In terms of our provider allowing torrent traffic, Mike will email to explain our usage, it seems likely at this stage they will allow it in our case. If not we will look at running a client elsewhere, and using the http://openbittorrent.com/ solution.

"you can add the trackers while creating the torrent, to get listed on
the sites you have to upload with there /upload form or contact each
site and figure out how to do it via scripts, i.e. pirate bay you need
to enter captchas unless you get a vip account, with that you can script
it more easily. some others would also accept atom/rss feeds with links
to torrents and would pull them in."

We've built collective.seeder, a product that whenever a new file (video) is uploaded, it symlinks it's blob file to the original file name, and creates a torrent for it.

You can specify as many torrent trackers (announce urls) as you want. This way, we can set up our own tracker, plus add openbittorent (piratebay) and other open trackers. I've updated testing.plumi.org which is now working with the openbittorent tracker. (A note to transmission bittorrent client users: transmission does not yet support trackers with udp urls so they can not connect to openbittorrent and a couple of other trackers. If they're lucky they might get it through DHT).

This enables our torrents to stay alive if one or two trackers go down.

I've also tested a local tracker (xbtt) these days that we can set up for em.org, although there are things to be discussed (better via skype) before proceeding with it.

I've also set up a torrent client daemon (deluged) on testing.plumi.org that automatically starts seeding new torrents.

Tested this using Transmission. Successfully downloaded, after looking not-available for about 30 seconds (no seeders were listed during this time). Would have tried on another client if I had time, but don't tonight.

Shame that Transmission isn't a reliable option - what cross-platform client should we recommend? Can we prompt users to use this client using a tooltip / alt-text, or some other UI signpost?

Re. UI - Font size on video view page needs increasing to be the same as "Download / Watch Ogg Theora Version". Also it should say "Seeders" not "S".

relating to 2. - about 2 hours later i checked the page again and now it says Seeders = 2. So it does appear to work, just has a considerable lag. is there any way to bring this time lag down, or should we just have to live with this?

There was an issue with mktorrent and zope. We've dumped mktorrent and are now creating the torrents ourselves. Normally there shouldn't be any delay for the creation of the torrent files from now on. I just tested it on a new video: http://testing.plumi.org/Members/clopy/videos/torrent1/

Seeders are updated every time our torrent client requests an update from the torrent tracker. Forcing it to update the stats sooner could get our IP banned from the tracker for some trackers. With more trackers on the torrent list, we should have shorter update times though.

Wow, this works beautifully. Torrent appeared very quickly (as soon as the page had reloaded). Torrent downloaded perfectly.

Will be interesting to see the impact of multiple trackers on the delay on the statistics, but this is totally fine for now. I imagine that for many videos the torrent will only be seeded by us in any case, but perhaps in the use-case of the Indo TV stations they will be seeding content over long periods of time so delays in statistics will not be such an issue anyhow.

Ticking this off, it's so exciting to see this working so well!!! Big congrats :)

see https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/117
You might want to know that a whopping FIVE YEARS LATER the impossible was made possible: transmission now DOES have UDP support! :)
And it works well, albeit uncertain whether any distros are already shipping the UDP-powered version.
If things go really bad, you will have to compile the release yourself.